Will you make the Same Mistake as Me? Your Baby Cannot Read

Your Baby Can Read – Early Literacy – Parenting.com.

We’re all looking for the perfect program or class to develop our latent baby Einsteins. Which is why the $199.95 Your Baby Can Read 5 DVD program (yourbabycanread.com) is so enticing — wouldn’t it be great if our babies were geniuses and could read?

Of course, implicit in the marketing is the assumption that our babies should read if we are to Keep Up with the Joneses, make our babies smarter, more athletic and genius artists.

Except, when I looked at child development research, I found that baby’s brain cells need time to grow and develop synapses. This happens with touch, stimulation, play, good nutrition, and that sort of thing. It takes time.

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The Your Baby Can Read creator, Titzer, claims on his website, “When children develop reading skills during their natural window of opportunity, from about birth to age four, they read better and are more likely to enjoy it.”. Not true says decades of research. Learning to read early means you learned to read early. It doesn’t mean that you are going to love reading.

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Here’s the other thing that bothered me about that overheard coffee shop conversation — Why? Why do we want our babies to read anyway? To beat out all the other kids?

We at  Caribbean Tots to Teens, RE-ENFORCE and SUPPORT the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for discouraging ALL ELECTRONIC MEDIA under the age of 2 years. This includes television, DVDs and computer programmes/games. (see Link)